November 02, 2011
I'm at an semi-interesting point in my project right now where I have working tech to build a game and I have a basic game idea. That means trying to do some prototyping to see if there's any actual fun hidden in my ideas. Ideas are cheap and easy to put down on paper but actually implementing so…
September 11, 2011
I had been planning on increasing the time between journal posts so I'd have more to talk about that might be interesting to folks but I didn't realize that I had taken that plan so much to heart. I honestly didn't plan on staying away for months but it looks like that ended up happening anyway. …
April 27, 2011
[font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2]For 98% of us working on side projects the biggest obstacle to reaching the finish line isn't a lack of technical expertise or a dearth of design ideas. The #1 cause of project death is motivation, or more accurately a lack of motivation. We all ha…
April 12, 2011
Wrapping up Collisions
I finished up passing collision events to individual objects at the end of last week and that went absolutely swimmingly. At the end of every physics frame I process all of the collisions and send the appropriate information to the objects involved. If the object wants to ac…
I finished up passing collision events to individual objects at the end of last week and that went absolutely swimmingly. At the end of every physics frame I process all of the collisions and send the appropriate information to the objects involved. If the object wants to ac…
April 07, 2011
I didn't think that there would ever be a worse PR vehicle for the games industry than the reality show "The Tester" on PSN. Really how do you top a bunch of people competing for a job with horrible pay, horrible hours where you get treated poorly? It seems though that IGN is up for the challenge…
April 04, 2011
It's been way too long since my last entry but it's not for lack of trying. Real life has been busy with a crazy couple of weeks at work along with a week long vacation in the sun so it's hasn't all been a bad kind of busy . I've managed to fit in some project work during all of that but I just h…
March 08, 2011
There's already been a lot of buzz from the Nintendo keynote at GDC and I'm sure there's going to be more in the next few weeks following GDC. It's not often a keynote address from one of the big 3 gives people something to talk about but this year was an exception. There were a few points in the…
February 26, 2011
I'm at the point where I want to start integrating a physics engine into my game. In the past I've always used ODE but it looks like that project has started collecting dust and some of the old wikis on it have disappeared. With that in mind I'm looking at a couple new possible options. The requ…
February 22, 2011
A few nights of coding again gets me in a situation where I have the exact same output from my engine but I'm in a far better place! I completed the transition from having an XML file representing a scene to just exposing all of the scene creation calls to Lua and creating a scene in script. It w…
February 18, 2011
Well the last couple of nights I've had some time to do some work and managed to get the input side of the house in order. I created an input listener component that is strikingly similar to the scriptable component. It is given a lua script to run and is passed in the latest input state to act u…
February 14, 2011
I put the finishing touches on my basic lighting model this weekend. Nothing too special but I can now have an arbitrary number of lights passed into the fragment shader to use for lighting. The lights are just basic directional lights but they get the job done for now and more importantly no lon…
February 10, 2011
One of the best parts about the journals here on GD.net is seeing the progress others are making on their project/games. It never ceases to amaze me how some people have the ability to just crank out work at such an incredible rate. And I'm not just talking about creating new content but also imp…
February 04, 2011
I had some coding time tonight so I started to dive into adding some lighting to my fragment shader. So far everything is very hard coded but I was able to get some simple phong shading going without too much trouble.
I'm really starting to like the programmable pipeline and the way I feel more c…
I'm really starting to like the programmable pipeline and the way I feel more c…
February 01, 2011
One of the goals on my current project was to be completely cross platform. To force myself down that path I targeted doing all of my development in Linux. I had recently changed to using Linux as my main day to day OS anyway so it wasn't a completely new world to me but it did mean finding a new…
January 30, 2011
One of the biggest challenges for me when working on a project is to fight off the natural lulls in work. When you're working on a game idea and start pretty much from scratch it's too easy to get overwhelmed by a project to the point that you lose all motivation to work on it. It's hard to see t…
January 27, 2011
I'm a big proponent of not recreating the wheel. There's so much great open source code out there now a days that you can get working code for almost any problem. The biggest problem with open source code is usually deciding which option to use as there are usually plenty of them. The major thin…
January 26, 2011
I've been on the road for the past few days so I don't have a tonne of new progress but I did manage to get some simple textured quads working with an ortho projection for UI type stuff. Nothing mind shattering but having the vertex shader making the right decisions of what to do based on the obje…
January 20, 2011
In my last post about implementing a component based object model I also mentioned my drive to become data driven. When I looked into building a data driven game I saw two big areas where being data driven can help things:
1. Building a scene
I opted to go with a simple xml file to define a scene bu…
1. Building a scene
I opted to go with a simple xml file to define a scene bu…
January 18, 2011
A few years ago when I was reaching the end of my multi-threaded game engine project I ran across the following article:
http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy/
I had never heard of the component approach to designing objects but it fascinated me and made total sense. After all…
http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy/
I had never heard of the component approach to designing objects but it fascinated me and made total sense. After all…
January 14, 2011
A year or so ago I attempted to make a come back to journal land with a new project. I figured I had made it past the adjustment of being a parent and was ready to get back into having a side project. I'm embarrassed to say that I totally fizzled out. It had been a while since I had failed at a …
January 13, 2011
I was in lurk mode and was getting ready to start posting work on my new project and this site revamp has motivated me to de-lurk a littler sooner than I planned. All and all I love the fresh start to the site and look forward to it's continued evolution.
It's been way too long since I've done any …
It's been way too long since I've done any …
September 30, 2009
So I have not been slacking off on hobbies and sitting around playing games but I have been short on gamedev work to post about. I have another fairly new hobby that takes over some of my free time come September and that is sports handicapping. NFL handicapping in particular.
Last year I started …
September 03, 2009
So every real project needs some kind of source control. Even if you're working on a single person project, like I am, source control is vital to keep yourself from going crazy.
In the past I've used SVN on almost all of my personal projects. It was always fairly easy to setup and run and provided…
August 28, 2009
Tractor Beam Progress
This week was spent cleaning up the hinge joint work that I got working last week along with refining things a bit. A quick video of the current state of the prototype can be seen here on ">YouTube. What you'll see in the video is:
- One large ogre head moving around. This…
August 22, 2009
This week I've been working on getting some prototype stuff up and running. The first thing I wanted to do was simulate a ship shooting a tractor beam and catching an object. This was easy to do with ODE using a nice little hinge joint centered on the ship shooting the tractor beam. The hinge le…
August 16, 2009
Once again I didn't get a lot of time this week for coding but I did manage to make a little bit of progress. I got the basics of ODE collision detection working. I now have my node objects encapsulate ODE geometry bodies independent of their Ogre3D visible bodies. For now I just have spheres, b…
August 11, 2009
I'm glad people appreciate the snappy title of my current project. The reality is that Game 2.0 is really how I picture my work. It's taking the work that I did last time to a whole new level, minus any of the baggage from last time. Plus I'm horrible at coming up with names so better to stick w…
August 09, 2009
Not a whole lot of dev time this week but I succeeded in getting the basics of the ODE physics engine integrated with Ogre3D. There's actually an Ogre3D plugin that tackles this task but I could not find a successful mac build of it anywhere. After spending a day trying to get things building pro…
August 03, 2009
One thing that I've noticed about the topics of GameDev books is that they almost all follow one of two paths:
1. Lets make a game given one tech and make it suit that game (ie. Making RPG Games in Flash 9)
2. Super technical books catering to the professional crowd (ie. Graphics Gems)
Now there's not…
July 31, 2009
After you make the decision to not re-invent the wheel as far as technology goes the next step is to figure out what technology you are going to use. It's not as simple of a task as it seems given all of the alternatives out there but it has been relatively fun for me. As I've been evaluating tec…
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